An Idea Forged in Iron

[Sia]

Her twin cores pulsated with stellar chakra, that is to say that it vibrated quaintly and quietly, calmly, soothingly. It was different here, soothing, just existing peacefully as a sage with the world.

Ikanbi of the sands began to lift off of the ground, though she never noticed it herself at first. Her eyes were shut softly, not tightly. Her hands together, her legs crossed, her rice sun hat shielded her eyes from any that happened to be there in the tranquil grove but, she was certain that she was not quite alone. No, there were certainly some creatures here, a few deer, bugs, birds, critters of sorts.

She opened her eyes and stared at the water below when a handful of geese splashed about and snapped her out of her meditation. She fell to the ground with a soft thud but kept her composure most carefully. She laughed for a good moment, throwing her head back as her arms planted on either side of her. She had been traveling in the wilderness for some time, she wasn't entirely sure where she was exactly, just she knew her relative position to Kemuri which wasn't terribly far at all. Really, she was practically there, she may as well be, but she wasn't, not literally.

No, she was just outside of it practically in the forests somewhat sorta kinda nearby and she had been meditating and training by herself for quite some time now, learning to adjust to the climate but otherwise living much as she did otherwise in Wind Country as way of the lands type of gal. She walked through the forests and found fruits and mushrooms and hunted small game and made an easy meal for herself. She kept many mushrooms in her bag for her journey home later, they would surely be a nice addition to a dish at some point.

She resumed her meditation and sat their silently, peacefully and enjoying the sounds of the forest and the fire in the dusk. The fire? Ikanbi moved over from her crossed legged position and checked on the food.

[Sia]

Kuuton chakra billowed outwards from Ikanbi's fingertips quietly and subtly as she played around with it slightly and delightfully. She sent cascades of the waves of chakra throughout the forest and a particular curtain of it danced through the sticks and firewood and jostled it around, rearranging it quickly into a pile and she burst it into flames with a strike of a tag from her pouch.

Sitting by the heat of the fire now, Ikanbi stared out at the geese and was amazed at how many there were.

"Wow, Iron country has a lot of geese that's crazy..." Her voice trailed off and she decided to cook some of the fish. She gathered coals from the fire and shifted them about with her bare hand with a grin on her face that no one in particular could see for no one in particular could really particularly appreciate the particular thing she had just done.

Still, Ikanbi smiled while she did it anyway because it amused her in a way and as she moved the coals around with her bare hand she did move the fish as well, making a slight adjustment to the composition of her body's sand and acid in her palms and stripping the scales right off of the fish with ease. It was a fine application of her body's properties that she had practiced with difficulty, it was not something that had come to her easily at all, she always felt accomplished when she performed it successfully without any repercussions to the product at hand.

She was a master of her craft, the science was exact.

It always seemed like absolute chaos to the others but Ikanbo of the sands for sure had some idea at least of what she was doing.

Or did she?

[Sia]

Inhaling deeply, Ikanbi felt her chakra as it seeped out from her body naturally and mixed into the air around her. She urged it silently to become ripe with Fuuton, then with Kuuton, then with ninpou, then all of the above, then she began to mix it together slowly with the sage chakra in the air around her and brought it together before her in her palms. She had to be careful, yes, the balance of the separate types of chakra here had to be done quite craftily, not hastily. Lastly, sensory. It was a fine balance, truly, what she was working with but it had to be done, it had to.

Kuuton and Sensory chakra permeated the area, the other elements she had called upon dissipated and dispersed throughout the area naturally, but the Kuuton and Sensory began to fan out, it gently caressed the geese and the waters, the leaves, the grass, the wind, the trees.

She guided the chakra and began molding its shape into a plethora of hands. Hands would do at least for now, yes hands. Invisible hands, but hands. She sent the kuuton out and it began gently feeling into the environment. She felt everything and took it in peacefully, drawing upon the sage chakra around her.

[Sia]

Some time later Ikanbi found herself deeper into the forests and taking shelter from a snowstorm inside what had turned out to be a most beautiful sort of cave. As she walked in she was, as it were, quite bewildered. It was fascinating almost, the way the light could catch some of the crystals in just the right way. She wondered if she could buy the land around it and build a house there, surely it wouldn't be that difficult to arrange such a thing. She could set up a mine going further into the cave, deep underground easily enough. She pulled out her map and examined quite carefully where exactly it was she was looking at.

She marked the location very precisely on her map after doing a bit of measuring and whatnot out in the trees surrounding the caves. "Yeah..that looks about right."

Ikanbi began formulating what exactly she would need to set up some new farmland out here by the cave. It wouldn't be that long of a haul realistically to bring her basic equipment from Wind Country if she played her cards right, in fact, maybe she would do just that. After all, she didn't particularly fit in in Sunagakure anyway. What difference did it make, really? She looked towards the sun briefly then tilted her head back downwards to shield her eyes from it using her hat. She began setting up a few torches and sconces, then scattered them here and there, wedging them into a few trees and lining the entrance to the cave a bit.

[Sia]

Finally, a bear.

Ikanbi's hand shot upwards and she willed the kuuton chakra to seep outwards from her fingertips. It ebbed, it flowed, it coiled and recoiled. It slithered through the air invisibly yet firmly, and it pressed on the throat of the bear with a gentle force that caused the bear to feel for the first time in quite some time....surprised. Ikanbi pressed the jutsu forwards, increasing her grip over te bear in sending it back and slightly away from her. At first she did this by using her hands and physically guiding the kuuton chakra outwards from her body but over time she wound up sending it out psionically, that is...

Ikanbi stopped using her hands to guide the Kuuton. She merely willed it and it was so. How interesting, she thought to herself as she began to play around with it. The could feel it, really. The overwhelming force generated by her body, but it was hard for her to describe to others exactly what she thought it felt like. Fortunately, she had someone nearby that as all too eager to help her out with the matter. "Try turning the bear."

Yes, that was a good idea, Ikanbi had to agree. Ikanbi stared at the bear and began to imagine it spinning around in her mind as the wave of kuuton began manifesting outwards from her body and riding through the air invisibly. Ikanbi took a few steps upwards then stood on her tippy toes, then caused the footing of the air to become solid in such a way that she leaned backwards against the air and just stood against it, she did this by taking her right foot and bending the knee so much that the sole of her foot was behind her back, and that's where she made the solid air platform, she then merely rested her back against it and moved her leg back to where it had been before.

She willed the physical Kuuton that leaked from her body to shift upwards and the bear lifted off of the ground and was tossed away from her but very gently. She frowned, it wasn't quite what she had intended, but it was something. Best to try again she supposed.

[Sia]

"I've been mad for years, absolutely years. I always have been. Absolutely unhinged I am." Ikanbi laughed to her entourage when they stared at her as though she'd just committed the most absolutely heinous crime they had ever witnessed in their entire life.

In their defense, she had. A few of them wept. One of them threw up, causing a few to turn away from him. She dashed through the next enemy, tearing him cleanly in half without even drawing a weapon, her body had merely caved straight through him and eroded him, her shoulder blasting into his sternum and forcing him to disintegrate away. One of her allies recoiled. It was...efficient...and gruesome.

It was too much, her allies thought.

Ikanbi was always shunned for her techniques. Always. They were too brutal, they killed without discrimination and without mercy or forgiveness. The pink sand was the worst, the most potent kind Ikanbi could produce, it reeked of acid and blasted through everything in its path indiscriminately. Her head turned suddenly towards the east when she heard bells tolling and she halted her feet mid-air and stood sideways parallel to the ground with her chest facing the east, the sudden and abrupt way in which Ikanbi had stopped in midair caught both her enemies and allies off-guard, as no one had sensed her utilizing chakra in order to perform the feat and she'd given no signal that it was about to happen, so many of them were very immediately confused by what they were seeing and weren't quite sure how to deal with it.

Ikanbi then immediately became the absolute fastest thing that anyone in the vicinity had ever seen. To this day they still weren't quite sure how it worked, she never really explained herself to them, all they could do was bare witness as Ikanbi of the sands suddenly jumped repeatedly on thin air in a manner that suggested she had truly ascended beyond all humanity around her. The way she moved, she no longer gave care to gravity, the air was her playground now, and all of her enemies were doomed to die for it.

If they were incapable of flying, then she killed them with very little contest.

She took her time, moving slowly as she began to walk upside down in the air and move upwards and way from the most of them, drawing her sword of detempering and slashing away at the one that had dared to come near her, utilizing a pull of kuuton chakra to draw him in with her open hand and causing him to impale his left eye directly into the blade, which ran through into its socket.

"Mmph, gross." Ikanbi said and flicked the blood from her blade as the body slid off and she took another step upside down in the air and sunk down lower from her point of view, but slightly higher into the air from the point of view of everyone else. "What the hell is she doing?" Said one of her allies, but she merely took another step and was suddenly pierced through two of the nearest enemies. Kuuton caught the two of them and collided them together, smacking their skulls together quite hard before Ikanbi removed them of the burden of their heads.

Her enemies found that it was quite difficult to deal with her, for even though she were not exactly hidden, that is to say, she was quite exposed when in the air, she had Kuuton and her body at her advantage. They throw many things at her whilst she was exposed in the air and all of them fell flat. Kuuton shoved so much out of her path, brought her enemies closer to her, moved allies closer to her enemies, arrows of Kuuton flew about the battlefield around Ikanbi, she began to spin around as she closed the distance between herself and the enemy.

As Ikanbi spun, she began to spin in many different sorts of ways. She pivoted around and spiralled not just horizontally, but vertically, and arrows of Kuuton began shooting off of her and firing in various directions. Pink and black in color the arrows curved around sharply, going in front and behind Ikanbi as she spun and took another step higher into the sky, spinning a fast several times as she shot pink arrows from the tips of her feet into her nearest two samurai allies.

These two samurai allies were hit with a force that...strengthened them? No, that wasn't quite the word the two of them used later to describe it. Enlightened. That was the word they had used.

Yes, the force that had hit Ikanbi's allied was described as Enlighened. They rose from their positions and began to float towards Ikanbi, slowly, slowly, so, so, slowly, orbiting around her but gradually increasing in speed before being made to shoot off at an incredibly crazy speed in the direction of the one nearest enemy samurai, she sent her two allies together in a flight of fancy to prey upon the poor bastard.

She didn't watch it but she heard it, their swords struck true and their one enemy fell in pieces to their two blades. Ikanbi landed next to them a moment later and encouraged them to press forwards. "Let's go boys."

So they did.

[Sia]

Ikanbi's two hands came apart and then slammed together right after she halted her detempering blade mid-air next to her hands. The Kuuton she unleashed that day slammed outwards in front of her and caused the entire army before her to lift upwards into the air. "Take your balance." She said to them loudly and they each began to adjust. "Good, good." Ikanbi said to them as she walked through the air around them effortlessly. To them the act was strange and tedious, walking on her kuuton platforms that she began to deviate beneath each of them with her technique, it was like walking on incredibly weird uneven ground. It was actually quite the work out many of them found, it was very exhausting on their legs almost immediately to the point where many of them wondered how in the world Ikanbi actually managed to sustain usage of the thing for long periods of time.

The answer was simple.

She was built different.

[Sia]

They had been practicing for quite some time now Ikanbi and the others had. She had been working with some of the samurai to resist the pull of her kuuton technique but also how to work alongside it in ways that were incredibly empowering and uplifting. Though this last batch of them had been particularly robust their had been a few fruity ones that Ikanbi had decided to take to the side at night and try out for a special series of tests. They would surely be tested, they certainly knew, but the youngest of them had no idea what was in store for him that night when Ikanbi had reached down and grabbed ahold of his hand. They traveled slowly at first, Ikanbi and the young one's body slowly fluttering through the air and avoiding trees easily, they were moving so slowly they had plenty of time to alter course and merely float slightly out of the way.

It really wasn't all that terribly difficult with enough practice Ikanbi had found and so she did begin to teach them some of the basics right then and there. The youngest, the one from sunagakure, the one that had traveled with her all the way from wind country. He would be the first. Her first acolyte. Through him all of the others would gain favor and it would branch out like a tree to plant roots. Sand would shoot like spores across the sky if only for a moment as Ikanbi dared to darken the sun for a moment as her eyes narrowed onto a particularly heinous target.

"Move swiftly and strike cleanly, this is not the time for mistakes." Ikanbi said somewhat curtly to him, he nodded and said in response however, "Yes ma'am."

Ikanbi moved her hand forwards and a jetison of Kuuton chakra swallowed her and the young one and they split off around a wide hill and reconvened nearby.